A drawing of Queen Victoria and an aircraft navigational system are among the items missing from museums in England.
Freedom of information requests by the PA news agency to museums and galleries that receive public funding from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) asking for details on absent items from the last 20 years found that more than 1,700 items were absent from collections.
The news comes after the British Museum disclosed last summer that more than 2,000 artefacts were found to be stolen, missing or damaged from its collections. George Osborne, the museum’s chair, suggested there was a lack of complete cataloguing at the museum.
Among the museums revealed to have absent items was the National Portrait Gallery in central London, which said it had 45 “not located” items – though insisted they were not missing or stolen.
Between 2007 and 2022, a drawing of Queen Victoria from 1869, a mid-19th-century engraving of King John granting Magna Carta, a bronze sculpture of painter Thomas Stothard and a 1947 negative image of the wedding of the late Queen to the Duke of Edinburgh, were recorded as “not found”.
The gallery said it still needs to complete searches for items after a three-year refurbishment and items recorded as unlocated represented 0.02% of its collection, which houses 12,700 portraits and 164,000 images.
At the Victoria and Albert Museum in west London, oil and watercolour paintings, a shadow puppet, false moustaches, various drawings, underpants, stockings and a mousetrap were among more than 180 missing artefacts.
The museum said it did not know if the objects had been lost or stolen. A V&A spokesperson added the museum takes “the protection of national collections very seriously and regularly reviews security and collection management procedures”.
Royal Museums Greenwich disclosed that about 245 items could not be found across its venues in south-east London. They included a navigational aircraft computer, a gun-sighting telescope, a cannonball, charts, liquid compasses, an act of parliament, an Altazimuth circle, which can be used for holding telescopes, and ribbons and bands for caps.
The museum said these could be “ghost entries, the result of data transfer from more primitive databases, incorrect documentation or human error in the past” and it has re-discovered 560 items since 2008 through audits.
The Natural History Museum said a jaw fragment of a late Triassic reptile, the Diphydontosaurus, was found to have been lost during a loan in 2019. In 2020, more than 180 fish were also recorded as lost, while a crocodile tooth was discovered to have been stolen.
A spokesperson for the west London museum said: “We take the security of our collection very seriously, so over the last 20 years we’ve had just 23 instances of lost or missing items from a collection of 80 million, limited to small things like teeth, fish and frozen animal tissue.”
The Science Museum Group reported two model steam trains, a King George V and a British Railways Standard 4MT class, as stolen to police in 2014. The museum has also recorded a 1960s model of a deep-sea observation chamber, a diver’s watertight torch, a resuscitating apparatus and a 19th-century portrait of Joseph Marie Jacquard as missing.
A spokesperson for the Science Museum Group, which houses 425,000 objects across its venues and centres, said it has begun putting barcodes on artefacts to track their locations and keep them safe.
The Tate art museums and galleries and the National Gallery both reported no missing items.
Horniman Museum and Gardens in south London recorded seven items including a 1933 protective charm as missing. The Wallace Collection, Museum of the Home, Sir John Soane’s Museum and National Museums Liverpool disclosed only a few missing items.
The Imperial War Museum reported more than 550 missing objects, including ship camouflage drawings, a British army officer’s private papers, a calendar with a photograph of former Iraq leader Saddam Hussein and currency notes.
A museum spokesperson said the artefacts “date from many years or even decades ago, long before our current collections management systems were put in place” and “are also typically low-value, mass-produced items”.
